Zdeněk Sýkora

Zdeněk Sýkora was born in 1920 in Louny, Czechoslovakia, where he lived and worked throughout his life. His studies in Prague after the Second World War combined art education, descriptive geometry, and architecture, and in 1947 he joined the Faculty of Education at Charles University, where he later became professor and taught there until 1980. His wife, Lenka Sýkorová, later joined him in his artistic practice and played an important role in the development of his work. He played hockey in Louny for many years and also cycled, skied, and later took up water-skiing, activities he described as a way to clear his mind and overcome fear.

Sýkora began painting in the 1940s, and by the late 1950s he started turning his practice toward abstraction. A decisive moment came in 1959 when he saw Matisse’s paintings in the Hermitage in Leningrad, which confirmed for him that color and form could act as independent, constructive elements instead of serving only as description of nature. This shift is visible in the Gardens series from 1959 to 1961, where the motif of a single tree or garden bed dissolves into planes of color and abstraction. In the early 1960s he created his first Structures, beginning with Grey Structure, which introduced a grid of geometric elements arranged through systems of variation. He continued to develop the Structures through the decade, expanding their scale and complexity. In 1964 he began working with mathematician Jaroslav Blažek and introduced the computer, becoming one of the first artists to use programming in painting. From this point his work centered on the relationship of order and chance, using the grid as a compositional system and as the surface on which these variations unfolded. In the 1970s he developed Macrostructures, where the contour line emerged as a primary element, leading to the Lines series that would occupy him for the rest of his life. These works, defined by computer-generated sequences and chance operations, reflected his view that randomness was a structural principle and that painting could model the order of nature and the universe. From the mid-1980s he worked in close partnership with his wife, Lenka Sýkorová, who became an essential collaborator in both concept and process. Together they designed the underlying systems, chose color sequences, and managed the execution of large-scale linear canvases.

His work was shown internationally starting in the 1960s including appearances at Nuove Realtà nell’arte in Genoa in 1965, the V Biennale di San Marino in 1965, Konstruktive Tendenzen in Frankfurt in 1967, and documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968. In the decades that followed, he took part in major survey exhibitions and retrospectives, among them Europa, Europa in Bonn in 1994, the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop in 1986, and later presentations at the Prague City Gallery, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, and ZKM in Karlsruhe. His paintings are held in major collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MUMOK – Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and the Neues Museum in Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he was named an honorary citizen of Louny in 1991, appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2003, and received the Herbert Boeckl Prize in Austria in 2005. Sýkora passed away in 2011.